Category Archives: Windows

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 2:43 pm on July 9, 2008
Tags: iis, windowsxp   

Hiding Windows Components in Windows XP

Something that could really come in handy for those involved in setting up PCs.  I was working on a laptop here and noticed the list of Windows Components on the Add/Remove Components menu was missing every component except the basic networking ones.  I was looking in particular for IIS, as I need to install it for some ASP.NET work.

Sure enough, there’s a ‘config’ file that controls which options are available in the Add/Remove window.  See the file c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf (note that ‘inf’ is a hidden Windows folder).  Credit to this forum post.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 8:56 pm on September 17, 2007  

Viewing large text files

Needed to look at a 8GB log file tonight.  Don’t ask why it was that big, it shouldn’t have been 😉  Only a brave soul tries to open that with Notepad or any old text pad application.

Once again, Google is your friend, as I found Large Text File Viewer.  It opened that file and only took 2MB of RAM to do it.  Coop sweet!

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 6:26 pm on March 17, 2006  

Updating a Windows Service

Ever need to update a Windows Service? I had a problem today at work, my PC was incorrectly setup by the technical services team, one of my services’ “Path to Executable” was pointing at the wrong .exe. I had seen the sc.exe command-line command before for creating services, but I only wanted to modify an existing service.

Luckily I found a page online that mentioned these settings are in the registry. Browse to the following hive and see all the settings for your service that you can modify, and at least the “Path to Executable” seemed to take effect immediately with no reboot (Windows XP Pro SP2).

DISLAIMER: Do this at your own risk! As always touching the registry is risque business )

\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\SYSTEM
\CurrentControlSet
\Services
\___YOUR_SERVICE_NAME___